“Boo!!”
“Woah!?”
As Ajax walks into the kitchen, an apparition pops out of nowhere, terrifying him into cardiac arrest. How did the apparition get into his house? Where is his little sister? He slowly falls to the ground, clutching his chest.
He dies, five seconds later, his tongue comically lolling out of his mouth, his eyes unmoving as he stares at the ceiling above him. He can see a masked figure looking down at him.
“...”
The Guy Fawkes mask does look quite creepy. When did she look through my room to find it? The not yet passed on spirit of Ajax wonders.
This masked person speaks no words, silently staring at his lifeless corpse. As he lays there dead on the ground, certainly dead, the apparition takes off its mask. By some accursed twist of fate, it appears that it wasn’t an apparition or cult movie serial killer at all, it was actually his 6 year old little sister, Rita.
What could have possessed her to play such a devious trick on him? Has she ever considered that he would fall to the ground dead as the dodo before she decided to do something so vicious?
As the dead Ajax’s eyes continue to stare at Rita, he sees his endlessly cruel and mischievous sister walk towards the kitchen sink and slowly pours herself a cup of cold water. She’s just tall enough to reach the sink, and Ajax thinks she looks quite adorable.
However, Ajax, seeing this action, stops playing dead, gets up off the somewhat dirty kitchen ground, and runs to the kitchen sink to ask her what she’s doing with her poured glass of water.
“What were you about to do, Rita?” He asks with an expression of amusement and slight unease. Was she about to throw water directly on Ajax’s face? Where and when did she come up with that?
“I saw a movie last night where a guy threw water at someone’s face to check if they’re knocked out or just asleep. I thought I would try that to make sure you didn’t pass away, brother. Why?” Rita says, an innocent smile on her face.
“*Sigh*, foiled again by your genius, Rita.” She’s growing smarter every day. He can see her smug grin and laughs internally. “You know, if you’re going to try that again, don’t pour yourself too much water, otherwise I’ll have to clean the rest of it off the kitchen floor.”
Rita realizes that he’s right as her hand covers her mouth in surprise. She does like pranking him, but she doesn’t want him to have more work to do. He does a lot of household chores already since their mother has to work during the day.
Yet, she is so amused with herself that she came up with that little plan. Her amusement is like that of other little kids, as if all of her thoughts and actions have never been done before by anyone in the history of humankind. New ideas fall out of her head all the time, new mischief to be had, new games to play.
She is well on her way to becoming chess champion at this rate if she continues to display similar levels of cunning and cruelty as she grows older.
"Hey." Ajax calls out to Rita, having rubbed up his hair to get any kitchen dirt off of it.
"What?"
"Let me see that glass of water for a sec, I'm thirsty."
"...No, this is my water." Rita quickly drinks down the cup of water, and hands Ajax the empty cup.
“How rude, little sister.”
Rita sticks her tongue out at him. Ajax looks towards her with a thin smile, while reaching out his hand to take the cup from her to put away into the dishwasher. That reminds him, he should empty out the dishwasher too. He touches Rita’s cup, but pauses.
"...?" Rita looks at his face, unsure why he paused.
So far this morning, he’s been having a good time playing along with his sister’s childish antics. However, an unwanted flash of memory reaches him, souring his mood. Rita looks at Ajax’s face. She sees a look of fear. A look of deep primal fear that she's never seen on his face before.
It is a fear that she's seen the likes of only once.
Her mother had told her about when Ajax was 8 and broke his leg. He tried to climb a fence and slipped when he was about to reach the top, falling and fracturing his right tibia. He even needed emergency room surgery to screw pieces of the leg bone back together.
Luckily, it even didn’t impact his leg’s growth, it was just memorable enough to share so Rita would not be reckless like her brother had been.
“One wrong move and he might have split his head open. Kids die like that all the time, just by being unlucky. What would your father and I have…”
Her mother revealed a face of unadulterated terror to Rita for just a second. It was a sharp emotion on her face. It had scared Rita, and now Ajax was showing that same fear on his face. She feels slight panic seeing him with that expression.
